Butter is a health food!

I recently read this book.

There is a bit of a story behind it and a coincidence. I have two good friends from church Jessica and JoAnna. We all like to cook, eat and talk about food. Jessica got married in July and soon after her wedding we were running and she was telling me about this book JoAnna got her as a wedding present. She’s telling me how this book says that the low-fat diet is bad. It encourages us to eat butter and animal fat but says vegetable oil and canola oil are killing us. It encourages eating organ meats and fermented vegetables and drinking raw (un-pasteurized milk). For a few weeks every time we ran we’d end up talking about this book. Meanwhile, I had started going to a Naturopathic doctor who was telling me similar things. She wanted me to quick drinking coffee and alcohol (for the time being) and cut vegetable oil, shortening, canola oil, high fructose corn syrup and sugar out of my diet. She wanted me to get raw milk and cultured butter and consume as much whole milk, butter and cream as possible (hello sounds wonderful). Sounded a lot like Jessica’s crazy book! Finally, I asked her about Nourishing Traditions and she said that was exactly the diet goal she had for me and I should read the book. So I did. And…it is amazing. I couldn’t put it down.

The premise behind this book is that we need to return to a more natural way of eating. The authors reference Weston Price, who studied the diets of native populations around the world. He found that all native populations who shared similar diets and health. They all consumed diets high in animal fats and omega-3 oils, high in organ meat and other animal protein and high in fermented dairy and vegetables. These are the principals the book argues we should have in our diet. The result is a more natural and nourishing diet. Reading it will challenge what you previously thought about health food but I encourage you to read it and see what you think. For me it made a lot of intuitive sense. I always wondered about low-fat. It seemed to me that in a lot of ways people were a lot healthier in the days of Laura Ingalls Wilder then we are today.